II ANCIENT TITLES

In antiquity, titular inscriptions regularly included a text's title as well as its author's name,Footnote ¹⁹ and could by the Roman period be found in five places around and on a papyrus roll: (1) on the sillybon (index in Latin), a small tag hanging off the roll,Footnote ²⁰ (2) on the recto at the text's beginning, (3) on the recto at the text's end (the subscriptio), (4) on the verso, an inscription visible when the roll was closed (a position called κατὰ τὸν κρόταφον) and (5) between texts inscribed on the same roll (so-called intertitles).Footnote ²¹ These inscriptions are not mutually exclusive and often coexist, which in some instances led to titular variation — i.e. the existence of more than one title for the same text.Footnote ²² This matter is further complicated by the widespread practice of identifying literary works by their opening words (the incipit) rather than by or in addition to an authorial title.Footnote ²³ Some of the ancient titles we have are in fact thought to be the products of an editorial process of selection between various titular contenders,Footnote ²⁴ a problem to which we will return. For now, I want to emphasise the title's materiality. This element is fundamentally literary, not only in its role as a bibliographical marker which aided in the organisation of texts, but in the title's very origin as something physically written onto the text or on a tag attached to it.Footnote ²⁵ This status is made manifest in the Greek and Latin words for ‘title’, ἐπίγραμμα/ἐπιγραφή and inscriptio/titulus, which all point to epigraphy.Footnote ²⁶ It should come as no surprise, then, that the birth of the title in the ancient world happens in the wake of increased textualisation and the spread of literacy.

Titles were first employed in fifth-century Athens for dramatic texts,Footnote ²⁷ a development in which the agonistic context played an important role. Plays in competition need to be clearly identified, distinguished from one another and organised post performance. They also needed to spark the audience's interest before they were staged. Indeed, Sommerstein has argued that this was the title's main duty, serving as an advertisement which was announced ahead of the dramatic festivals, likely at the proagon: ‘Greek play titles, then, were primarily designed for advance publicity — sometimes to inform the audience about the content of the play, and sometimes to keep them guessing, often wrongly, not only before the performance but for some time after it had begun’.Footnote ²⁸ This dynamic is especially evident in the titles of Old Comedy: unfettered by convention, comic playwrights invented wildly creative titles to tantalise the audience (what could a play titled ‘Frogs’ possibly be about?),Footnote ²⁹ although Euripides was also clever with titles, employing them to generate expectations that would be defeated in the course of the play.Footnote ³⁰ That is, in Classical Athens dramatic titles were strategically employed as a means of arousing the audience's interest in a text's future realisation. Titles anticipated their texts by no less than several days and circulated alone, selected to have an effect in that form.

As a literary apparatus integral to the text's success, the title enjoyed a prominence in Greek theatre unparalleled in other ancient genres. As much is reflected in the papyrological record where theatrical texts are the only works whose titular inscriptions are found to contain the title preceding the author's name, rather than the conventional author+title form.Footnote ³¹ Such a close affiliation of plays and titles appears, moreover, to have contributed to an overall stability of the latter (even if we know that some variation did occur, in both tragedy and comedyFootnote ³²), and thus the author-ity of those titles transmitted to us: most titles we have for Attic drama (thanks in no small part to the Athenian festival inscriptions) appear to be the real, original deal — the very titles chosen by playwrights which were considered inseparable from the plays they labelled.Footnote ³³ A similar dynamic is detectable in Roman drama, to which we now turn.

III TITLES OF AND IN ROMAN COMEDIES

The title in Roman literature has received considerably less critical attention than Greek titles have.Footnote ³⁴ In 1943, Daly reviewed the evidence for republican titulature but left out both oratory and drama;Footnote ³⁵ this was followed by Horsfall's Reference Horsfall1981 article which does the same for titles between Cicero and Suetonius.Footnote ³⁶ Schröder's Reference Schröder1999 monograph Titel und Text is more comprehensive in its coverage, but nevertheless treats Roman comedy only brieflyFootnote ³⁷ and, in any case, like her predecessors, Schröder declines to engage in the sort of interpretive work which I do here.Footnote ³⁸ There is, then, no real discourse to speak of — neither in terms of understanding Latin titles qua meaningful paratexts (even if individual attempts to do so have yielded interesting resultsFootnote ³⁹) nor on the titles of Roman comedy specifically.Footnote ⁴⁰ In fact, when these are discussed, their existence (their invention, transmission and authenticity) is taken for granted,Footnote ⁴¹ with one important exception: Fontaine has repeatedly expressed scepticism about the authenticity of Plautine titles that are in Latin, arguing that these are ‘later accretions of grammarians, revival producers or simple misunderstandings of the text’.Footnote ⁴² Consonant with his hypothesis about the Hellenic character of Plautine comedy, Fontaine argues that Plautus gave all his plays Greek titles. Curculio was called Gorgylio, Pseudolus is actually Pseudylus, etc. I will have more to say later about the assumption implicit in Fontaine's position, an assumption resembling that operative in Conte's comments quoted above, i.e., that a Greek title designates a Greek-ish play. For the time being, Fontaine's argument underscores the difficulty associated with studying the titulature of Roman comedies. Can we confidently attribute the plays’ titles to their playwrights?

For Terentian comedy, there can be no doubt about the titles’ author-ity. Terence names the play's title in each of his six prologues which, further, have never been impugned as anything but authentically Terentian. But the genesis, performance and means of preservation of Roman comedy before Terence are hotly debated, and the notion of the title as a literary artifact open to interpretation would be excluded (even if its proponents have never taken up the question) by the theory that the texts we have are not scripts but transcripts, the collaborative products of repeated stagings of improvised performances based on a Mediterranean comic koine rather than on specific source texts.Footnote ⁴³ After all, such ephemeral performances do not have authors, nor do they belong to the sort of textualised milieu which we have seen to be inseparable from the title's inception. In this model, the plays were born on street corners, and later coopted into state festivals. While such performances would inevitably need to be referred to by titles (whether by the performers themselves or by the spectators), these would be ad hoc and subject to change, making the titles we have inventions of later criticism when unstable recordings of oral theatre turned into literature. This picture of ‘early Roman comedy’,Footnote ⁴⁴ however, fails to convince for various reasons. Not least of these is chronology, since the history of the palliata is more of a continuum than this popular model admits. Only twenty-five years at the most separate the last of Plautus’ performances from Terence's first performance in 166,Footnote ⁴⁵ whereas Caecilius Statius, who is reported to have died in 168 or 167 b.c., overlapped in his lifetime with both playwrights. In fact, Caecilius Statius and Terence were regarded by the ancients themselves not as hailing from different generations but rather as poetic colleagues: Ambivius Turpio (a so-called theatrical impresario and prologus for Terence)Footnote ⁴⁶ claims in Hecyra to have previously acted in Caecilius’ plays, performances in the course of which he was driven off stage or barely kept the audience's attention, just as had (allegedly) happened in previous attempts to stage Terence's Hecyra. And in another anecdote, we hear that Terence read his Andria to Caecilius Statius.Footnote ⁴⁷ Even if this interaction between the two poets is likely apocryphal,Footnote ⁴⁸ what matters to us is that Caecilius Statius was considered a contemporary of Terence in antiquity. These facts make it untenable to posit such a radically different cultural milieu for Terence (literary, learned, textual, Greek) and his predecessors (oral, fluid, improvisatory, Italian). Further still, we find evidence within the plays themselves that they came into existence as text, composed by a single playwright and based on another text in Greek. As much is clear from the portrait of script-based playmaking cast into Plautus’ playsFootnote ⁴⁹ as well as the presence of literary allusion which is suggestive of a learned culture of reading,Footnote ⁵⁰ and the very close, even verbum pro verbo translation we can observe mixed with free adaptation of Menander's Dis Exapaton in Plautus’ Bacchides.Footnote ⁵¹

Likewise do titles tell us something important about Roman comedy by presenting the scripts they label as distinct literary artifacts destined to exist within a textualised culture. The plays demonstrate such an understanding of other literature, too; consider the reference to Euripides’ Alkmene by the tragedy's title in Rudens, for instance, or that to Aristarchus’ Achilles at the start of the Poenulus.Footnote ⁵² Into the same category fall the titular citations of Greek models in Plautus’ six didascalic notices.Footnote ⁵³ Not incidentally, these sites of literary self-consciousness also give us the Latin comedies’ titles. These are our earliest titles in LatinFootnote ⁵⁴ and the earliest unequivocal proof of authorial titulature in all of ancient drama. I print here only the passage from Casina (Cas. 29–34Footnote ⁵⁵), as we call this play; Casina is clearly an allographic title to which we will return below. The remaining five didascalic references may be found in the Supplementary Appendix.

A fragment of Naevius, long presumed to be from the prologue, also gives a title, although it is unclear whether the poet is giving the title of his own comedy, that of his Greek source or a title common to both (Naevius 1 R³):

Together with the evidence from Terence, these passages indicate that authorial titulature was the rule in Roman comedy, irrespective of whether a title's placement in the prologue was the exception (as it seems to be in Plautus) or the rule (as it is in Terence). Why would a playwright give a title to just some of his comedies and not all of them? We can only speculate as to the reason he might choose to emphasise a particular title by advertising it at the beginning of a performance, but there appears at any rate to have been another method of dissemination whereby all titles would have been made known to the audience, including those not announced in the prologue. Donatus informs us that titles were broadcast before the performance together with the names of the dramatists, a claim also made by Pollux.Footnote ⁵⁶ And however they were announced, comic titles circulated as unaccompanied indexical markers immediately, recognisable to an audience contemporary to the plays’ composition. So in Plautus’ Bacchides, Epidicus is cited by title (Plaut., Bacch. 213–15), and Terence knows and names the Roman comedies composed by his literary predecessors by their titles (Ter., Eun. 25–6; Ter., Ad. 6–7).

Terence's prologues are our last pieces of evidence for comic titles for several decades. The titles reappear at the end of the second century b.c. in the literature that grows up around comedy starting with the work of the first Roman philologists like Aelius Stilo, whose research was foundational for subsequent generations of Plautine scholars including Volcacius Sedigitus. These authors commented on comic texts and considered questions of literary history, using titles widely in their work and thereby demonstrating these indexical markers’ importance. Titles were themselves worked on, figuring prominently in discussions about Plautine authenticity and organised into indices;Footnote ⁵⁷ Aurelius Opilius’ Pinax, for instance, seems to have been an acrostic work in verse composed of lists of Plautus’ titles.Footnote ⁵⁸ Such material forms the basis of the sources which preserve the titles and fragments of Caecilius Statius, a tertiary tradition we will take up shortly.

Broadcast before the performance, announced in the prologue, employed indexically and featured prominently in the secondary and tertiary literature, titles were an important thing in Roman comedy, which in view of our preceding discussion should come as no surprise. For the title is an important thing in drama tout court, taking on an integral role in a play's afterlife as text as well as in various ways before and during its performance. Indeed, the title's immediate effects — i.e., those which condition the text's reception — would have been as valuable to republican comic playwrights as they were to those of fifth-century Athens. Granted that the circumstances of Roman drama's production and performance are different from those of Attic drama; but even with the agonistic context missing,Footnote ⁵⁹ poets would nevertheless have been motivated to publicise their plays for commercial success since they sold their scripts for profit. Although we do not know exactly how this worked, it seems that poets turned a higher profit for a successful performance. So Plautine plays may have commanded a higher price tag than those written by other authors, if the veritable industry impersonating the playwright's authorship is any indication.Footnote ⁶⁰ This points us to yet another of the title's functions, viz. its ability to mark ownership of a text. (Recall that titular inscriptions often included the author's name, a composition reproduced in the Plautine didascalic references, which assert Plautus’ authorship together with the plays’ titles.) Castelli has shown that this impulse is behind the title's earliest antecedents,Footnote ⁶¹ and literary ownership was doubtlessly a major concern for republican playwrights, too: as much is indicated by the phenomenon of Plautine impersonation as well as by the prologues of Terence, which seek to defend the poet against accusations of furtum.Footnote ⁶²

In the title, then, republican comic playwrights found a tool which addressed two major literary priorities by allowing them to garner an audience and to stamp their compositions as their own. Even if we are missing anything like the Athenian festival inscriptions to guarantee them, this prominence gives us strong grounds for assuming the author-ity of those titles that have been transmitted to us. The title of a Roman comedy was not an accessory to the text, but an indispensable component of it both pre- and post-performance, and was occasionally even announced in the course of the play itself. We will return to this question of authenticity, but need first to trace the path of the scripts and the titles that labelled them as these moved from a living performance tradition into the studies of Rome's first philologists. In what state did readers like Stilo find the texts of comedy? The matter is again complicated by ongoing debates, in this instance about the vicissitudes Roman comedies endured (or did not) before the end of the second century b.c.

As the general critical consensus would have it, Roman comedies did not circulate widely after their initial performance. It is assumed that these scripts remained in the possession of theatre professionals who had purchased them from their authors.Footnote ⁶³ In this period, they are envisioned to have existed more as collaborative Google Docs than as PDFs, as it were, undergoing considerable change via interpolations and/or the introduction of new material invented by actors in subsequent revivals.Footnote ⁶⁴ Only once under the mantle of philological study is Roman comedy thought to have fossilised into the form in which we now know it, compiled into scholarly editions accessible to the reading public.Footnote ⁶⁵ This reconstruction, otherwise entirely conjectural, would appear to be substantiated by Terence in the prologue to Eunuchus. The playwright claims to have not been previously acquainted with comedies by Naevius and Plautus titled Colax, plays from which he has been accused of stealing two characters (Eun. 19–34). Of this passage, Deufert declares that ‘[d]araus ist zu schließen, daß deren Komödien nicht in einer Buchausgabe verbreitet waren, die Kenntnis der Stücke vielmehr ein Nachforschen in den Unterlagen der Schauspieldirektoren erfordert hätte’Footnote ⁶⁶ — and thereby falls right into Terence's trap. For the playwright's claim is patently disingenuous, part of a rhetorical strategy designed to defend him from the uetus poeta's allegation of furtum — if we believe that the feud between these two poets was even real; Sharrock has suggested that the literary spat was invented by Terence for the purposes of espousing his comic aesthetic.Footnote ⁶⁷ Either way, Terence was clearly familiar with his comic predecessors’ work. Not only does he cite Plautine plots elsewhere as precedent for his practice of contaminatio and replicate the corpus’ tropes and characters (commented upon already in antiquity, by DonatusFootnote ⁶⁸), but he even quotes two lines from Trinummus’ prologue (Plaut., Trin. 16–17) in the prologue to Adelphoe (Ter., Ad. 22–3).Footnote ⁶⁹ Such close, manifestly literary engagement suggests that the texts of previous playwrights like Plautus were neither amorphous nor inaccessible in the 160s, but that they had already taken on sufficient textual stability so as to be quotable and were, further, in circulation, available to consult before philological work on them had begun — and apparently not just by theatre professionals, either. For if Terence employs literary quotation, it must be the case that at least a portion of his audience was capable of recognising it. What would be the point of a quotation otherwise?

Let me be clear. The fact of textual engagement with and even quotation of comic scripts neither excludes the possibility that these preserve traces of improvisation in (re)-performance nor that they encourage the same through the inclusion of elastic gags and the like. It does, however, speak against the notion that Roman comedies were entirely fluid texts before the work of second-century scholars, and supports the contention that from the time of their performance they were bibliographically identified as specific plays composed by specific authors with specific titles. The same set of circumstances also suggests that by the time they reached the hands of the first Roman philologists, comedies (and their titles) had not substantively changed from their original form. Let us now finally get to Caecilius Statius’ titles and to the last hurdle in comic titles’ transmission.

IV CAECILIUS STATIUS’ TITLES

The forty-three titles we have for Caecilius Statius are the following:Footnote ⁷⁰

None of these titles is preserved in the fragments. All are transmitted by our sources for the fragments which include Cicero and Aulus Gellius as well as lexicographers like Festus and especially Nonius, who transmits more of Caecilius Statius’ titles than any other source. This fact potentially complicates our study since such authors did not reference our playwright's texts directly but instead relied on indices, compendia and commentaries — those scholarly products of the late second century b.c. discussed above.Footnote ⁷¹ Did comic titles reach this tertiary tradition altered by their circuitous route from the middle republican period? This is a possibility, and at least in one case a verifiable reality. The text we know as Casina was called Sortientes by Plautus, as is made clear by the didascalic reference at Cas. 29–34, cited above. We can trace the change to within 150 years of the comedy's composition, for Varro already calls it Casina.Footnote ⁷² This date, as well as the play's new title itself, suggest that Sortientes became Casina in a performative context rather than a bibliographical one: in the revivals of Roman comedy that occurred throughout the late Republic (a period to which Casina's own prologue in part attests), we can well imagine spectators calling this play by its most memorable character rather than its authorial title, a title that made it into the edition of Plautus used by Varro.Footnote ⁷³ There is a second instance of this same sort of titular change which is attested to by Fulgentius: the late-antique grammarian calls Vidularia ‘Cacistus’, after the fisherman character who presumably found the travel bag which gives this now-fragmentary play its original title.Footnote ⁷⁴ But the fact that our other sources for Vidularia get its title right (lines from this play are quoted by the usual suspects, including Nonius and PriscianFootnote ⁷⁵) should give us pause: perhaps the lexicographers are more careful than we give them credit for, and Sortientes/Casina is the exception rather than the rule.

When considering the titles of Caecilius Statius, then, we must remain cognisant of the possibility that we are dealing with a title that is an artifact of a play's reception rather than the invention of its author (an interesting sort of artifact per se, if not my focus here). And yet it seems safe to proceed on the assumption that many if not most of the titles we have for Roman comedy made it unscathed into the indirect tradition, and not just those named in the prologues. For if occurrence in a comic text were the only factor to ensure a title's correct transmission, surely this would be true for Casina, too. We can, moreover, verify the accurate preservation of two Plautine titles which we do not get in the prologues from the mid 160s into the imperial period: in a letter to Fronto, Marcus Aurelius refers to Plautus’ Colax, a title that appears at Ter., Ad. 6–7. This Terentian passage also substantiates the citation of Plautus’ Commorientes in Gellius and Priscian.Footnote ⁷⁶ For the Caecilian titles specifically, much of our evidence is later, and most of it comes from the lexicographers. But why should we accept the authenticity of a Caecilian line reported by Festus or Nonius but entirely reject the title they attribute to it — especially given that they relied on the same source for both? Granted that these authors sometimes get the details wrong: they misattribute linesFootnote ⁷⁷ and do occasionally get titles confused; e.g., Varro's Logistoricus is cited by Nonius under five slightly different titles.Footnote ⁷⁸ We have seen, however, that dramatic titles were different. These were an integral element of the play which served to designate it, to advertise it and to guard it from misattribution, and not only from the playwrights’ point of view: in the secondary tradition upon which the tertiary depends, titles were compiled into indices and debated. And in the tertiary tradition, titles are cited almost without exception along with comic fragments.Footnote ⁷⁹ That is, comic titles were the objects of critical scrutiny themselves (recall that Opilius’ Pinax was composed entirely of Plautine titles!), increasing the likelihood that these were accurately preserved through the various stages of comedy's ancient reception. But what about their subsequent transmission down to us? As is the case for so much ancient literary material, the attestation of Caecilius’ titles is by no means perfect. While some titles are well attested and pose little difficulty, others are outright problematic.Footnote ⁸⁰ I avoid the latter in my analysis, and make note of variant readings or conjectures wherever applicable. Details are laid out in the Supplementary Appendix.

Complete certainty as to the titles’ authenticity lies beyond our grasp. And yet an absolutist sceptical approach which excludes the study of all titles because some may not be authentically authorial is too intellectually ambitious. We have more to gain by positing author-ity and proceeding with interpretation than we do from assuming that all the titles we have are, like Casina, products of the plays’ reception, or have been mangled beyond recognition in transmission. Sommerstein puts it perfectly when he remarks that ‘once the data [i.e. the titles of Greek drama] were roused from their sleep in the archives and got into the hands of scholars, they were liable to be edited and adjusted, and in some cases this has almost certainly happened, but the onus of proof must always be on whoever alleges that it has.’Footnote ⁸¹ Let us see, then, what Caecilius Statius does with titles, and what his titles can do.

V BILINGUAL PLAY WITH TITLES

What's in the title of a play? Quite a lot, despite Lessing's opinion that Plautus gave his comedies insignificant titles.Footnote ⁸² As Genette has taught us, the title is always a message: titles are designed not just to designate texts, but also to manage our relationship with them, enticing us from the threshold to come in and, once we have, influencing our understanding of what follows. That is, the title is very much an interpretive key designed to guide our reception of the titled text. This function explains why in Roman comedy we find titles mentioned in the prologue, where theatrical induction happens. The prologus seeks to both grab our attention and to focus it — whether on a theme, a character, an object or a scene of the play to follow. And whichever element of the text is chosen as titular becomes ipso facto invested with significance. Let us suppose that Plautus’ Pseudolus were called Calidorus instead. How would our understanding of this comedy change? It seems obvious that the adulescens would become the subject of more analysis than he is. Currently, we mostly ignore him because nothing tells us he is important. But if Calidorus were the title character, spectators, readers and critics alike would be incited to ask why. And if we were to put our minds to it, we could come up with any number of interesting observations. For example, we might conclude that the hypothetical Calidorus is a play that highlights the irony of a genre featuring slaves who act out as if they were free but for the benefit of their masters. The play is actually about attaining Calidorus’ wish (possession of Phoenicium) and concludes with an ending that is happy really only for him. But Plautus has told us that the comedy is about the suitably named Pseudolus, training all eyes on this crafty slave translated from Greek to Latin who lies (ψεύδω) and cheats (dolus) his way through the plot. Crucially, that much is evident even to those who have not watched or read the comedy, since Pseudolus signifies very well even without its play — at least for anyone acquainted with the genre of Roman comedy: this speaking name (the masculine ending leaves no doubt that Pseudolus is a male character) can belong to no one but a slave who, one would reasonably assume, does in this play what slaves do in all of Plautus’ plays (lies and cheats!).

There is likewise much one could do with the list of forty-three playless titles we have for Caecilius Statius. For instance, we might explore the poet's apparent interest in thingliness. Four of Caecilius’ plays were titled after everyday objects: Epistula (‘The Letter’), Hypobolimaeus Rastraria (‘The Changeling/Play about the Hoe’), Plocium (‘The Necklace’) and Symbolum (‘The Seal’) draw our attention to stage properties and place in the spotlight these objects which exist simultaneously in the theatrical world and in the real world. Plocium asks us to focus on a necklace, taking note of its appearance and transfer from character to character, or perhaps to realise that it does not appear on stage at all and to wonder why. Epistula and Symbolum invite us to look for writing and, further, suggest documentary mischief, a type of comic ruse that features prominently in the Plautine corpus and which we find mentioned in the fragments of Caecilius’ Synephebi.Footnote ⁸³ The titles, however, highlight a notable difference between Caecilius Statius and his predecessor Plautus in, at the very least, the titular presentation of such plays that revolve around the deceptive power of writing. While Plautus prefers to emphasise the tricksters in his titles,Footnote ⁸⁴ Caecilius Statius’ titles seem to accentuate the physical medium of textual tricks. The potential effects of privileging objects over their agents are manifold, posing questions about the order of subjectivity, for instance, and the role of the physical in everyday human existence. In particular, Symbolum encourages us to contemplate the notion of documentary authority by putting at centre stage a thing employed to embody its owner via text, a mechanism Rome was becoming ever more reliant upon in the administration of its burgeoning empire. The same author-guaranteeing object (a seal) raises issues of originality most relevant to the poetics of any translator-poet.

These thing-titles also point us towards a remarkable transparency in Caecilius’ titular corpus. Many of his comedies bear titles that imply a plot type, preparing the audience for what is to come or, conversely, setting up a horizon of expectations that will be later defeated. This is true of Caecilius’ multiple hypobolimaeus plays titled after the suppositious child motif, to which we will return. Caecilius Statius’ titles are also strongly conventional in their evocation of stock comic roles: Epiclerus (‘The Heiress’), Harpazomene (‘The Abducted Girl’), Nauclerus (‘The Skipper’), Obolostates uel Fenerator (‘The Moneylender’), Meretrix (‘The Prostitute’), Titthe (‘The Wetnurse’), Portitor (‘The Customs Officer’) and Synephebi (‘The Comrades in Youth’) were all plays titled after recognisable characters of the genre, not only generating reasonable assumptions about the comic storyline (e.g. Epiclerus must have featured a conflict over an heiress) but also gesturing towards character studies and inviting the spectators to ponder how the character(s) mentioned in the play's title would measure up to others in the genre. Will the eponymous meretrix be bona or mala? I would add, too, that the high percentage of female names amongst Caecilius Statius’ titles may be significant. Women account for almost one-third of Caecilius’ titular characters — ten out of thirty-five. A special interest in gender is in fact suggested by the tantalising comment of an anonymous scholiastFootnote ⁸⁵ on Horace (Comm. Cruq. ad Hor. Ars. P., 236–9):Footnote ⁸⁶

Such a female-centred plot fits in nicely with the preponderance of female titles attested for the poet and may have even found its way into Terence, whose titles betray a similar interest in women.Footnote ⁸⁸ Is it a coincidence that Caecilius’ girl-saving slave-heroine is called Pythias, just like Eunuchus’ ancilla who so righteously expresses another girl's traumatic experience during a rape?

Caecilius’ titles thus present us with much food for thought and there are many possible avenues of inquiry in studying them. My interest here, however, lies in discerning what the playwright is doing with language in his titles, and how these engage with translation as a literary and cultural phenomenon. In that vein, I want to return to the idea that Greek titles of Roman comedies indicate Greek-ish plays. This is a commonly held view. Take what Manuwald says:

This logic, which has been used on Terentian comedy, too,Footnote ⁹⁰ is imprecise and faulty. Does ‘Hellenic’ mean more faithful in translation of the Greek source text, or just more Greek in the play's tone and content? These attributes do not necessarily coincide, and the latter is outright problematic since our idea of what is ‘Italian’ and what is ‘Hellenic’ relies on speculative reconstructions of lost plays and thus what we think Greek new comedies were like.Footnote ⁹¹ Another wrinkle in this relates to the correspondence, or lack thereof, between the source text's title and that of its translation. A Greek title does not automatically mean a title identical to that of a comedy's model, for Roman comic playwrights often invented their own Greek titles: there are no known Greek equivalents for Caecilius’ Symbolum or Chrysium, for example. And on the other hand, Latin titles can be entirely new inventions, but they can also be simple translations of Greek titles. Whereas Meretrix seems to be unparalleled in Greek New Comedy, Maltby and Slater list four Greek plays titled after exiles, any of which might stand behind Caecilius Statius’ Exul.Footnote ⁹² Even if we can speculate on what the difference is between these various Greek and Latin title types, there is little we can say for certain about what they mean for the lost Caecilian plays’ relationship to their lost models. On the matter of Greek and Latin titulature in Roman comedy, we can only confidently assert the following: (1) the act of changing the title of one's source text in its Latin translation is an appropriative move;Footnote ⁹³ (2) a Greek title identical to that of the translation's model could indicate fidelity but could also, by antiphrasis and with a powerful paraprosdokian effect, designate a comedy with a high degree of Roman originality; and (3) since it was possible to change the model's title to something else entirely in its translation, the retention of a Greek title (whether left in Greek or translated into Latin) is not a mechanical move but a purposeful one. We shall see that Caecilius uses this last strategy with fascinating results.

In this final section of my article, I, too, seek to understand how Caecilius’ titles relate to translation and to the problem of originality it poses, but not by trying to discern what titles signify about a comedy's equivalence to or divergence from the model. I am interested, rather, in a dimension of meaning in the titulature of Caecilius’ comedies that goes beyond this, connotative effects which arise out of titles’ dual existence. As identifiers of plays in Latin performed at Rome which, however, are set in Greece and originate as Greek comedies performed at Athens, the titles of Roman comedy are (like its plays) markedly double, and it will emerge that such doubleness manifests itself in various ways throughout Caecilius’ attested titles and is echoed in some of the surviving fragments, too. These in fact demonstrate that our playwright could be quite metaliterary; several of the fragments explicitly refer to the play as a play and manifest various sorts of reflexiveness.Footnote ⁹⁴ However, the connotative effects of Caecilius’ titles are operative irrespective of the lost comedies’ content. As we saw above, titles are paratexts designed to circulate alone and thus to signify independently of the texts they label. Of course, my reading of any given title's effect can be countered by the usual objection: how can we be sure that the playwright intended for his titles to be interpreted as such? The fact is that we cannot ever have complete confidence on this question (even if there are hints of authorial intent, as I argue below), and as a result the readings presented in what follows will remain ultimately unfalsifiable. But my discussion nevertheless shows us what the Caecilian titles can do by parsing out their interpretive possibilities in the mind of an ancient spectator, thereby telling us something both significant and interesting about this playwright's comedy.

We will start with the most basic of effects in Caecilius’ Chalcia, titled after an Athenian bronze workers’ festival and based on Menander's play of the same title, Chalkeia (Χάλκεια). That is, si uera lectio: Chalcia is Spengel's conjecture for (in) Calcis, the reading transmitted by all the manuscripts.Footnote ⁹⁵ For its original Greek audience, Chalceia highlighted a twofold overlap in the dramatic setting, emphasising that Menander's play was not only (as were most Greek new comedies) doubly Athenian in its real-world and theatrical locations but that it was also doubly festive: Chalkeia was both performed during a festival (albeit not the Chalkeia itself) and its title suggests that it depicted events that somehow related to a festival, too. Perhaps the plot revolved around the aftermath of a drunken festival rape or actually took place during the Chalkeia. Or maybe the play ended with the Chalkeia's celebration. It is impossible to know for sure how this festival figured in the play's plot, but its title tells us that Menander wanted his audience to think of the festival, wherever it was located in theatrical time. Such a blurring of the line between ‘here’ on stage and ‘here’ off stage makes the comic world into a mirror that reflects back upon the audience a portrait of itself — both generally, as Athenians, but also specifically in this very moment at the present festival. Chalcia, however, would work differently as the title for a Roman comedy. Through the Greek title's retention, the disruption of the original play's alignment (a disruption entirely typical of the genre) would be accentuated: the festival in the title of the Roman version is something that happens ‘there’ rather than ‘here’. Paradoxically, then, titular equivalence emphasises difference, since what was local in Menander's play would now be foreign in Caecilius’, and accordingly the onstage world would go from a speculum vitae to a display of Rome's new sphere of colonial influence (although Athens was not officially conquered until the mid-second century, Rome was already meddling in Greek affairs). Further, the real-world performance setting at Rome is likewise a festive one, which would allow for a comparison of like with like, on stage and off: how does Roman festival behaviour compare to that of the Greeks? But there is more. Whereas an ancient Athenian would immediately have understood Chalkeia as referring to a religious holiday and thus would have been equipped to formulate assumptions about this comedy's plot before watching it, the average Roman theatre-goer would likely not have known enough about Greek religion to recognise in this title a minor Athenian festival. Such a spectator would have had to wait until Chalcia was staged to understand the meaning of its title; indeed, this exotic title might have generated curiosity and interest.

A similar dynamic is at play in Caecilius’ Imbri (‘The Imbrians’) and his Syracusii (‘The Syracusans’).Footnote ⁹⁶ Use of these titles to identify comedies performed at Rome instead of in Greece entails a reorientation of geographical perspective and a switch in the ethnonyms’ meaning, for they now refer to foreign peoples instead of to fellow Greeks. Syracusii is especially striking as the title for a Roman comedy in that it functions as macro allusion to recent history. An ancient audience could not but have connected this title to Rome's epic siege of Syracuse in 213–211 b.c., a protracted battle which had occurred only twenty-five years or so before the play's performance and in which members of Caecilius’ original audience could easily have been personally involved. Spectators may have been soldiers in the campaign or potentially even inhabitants of that city, making them the unfortunate title characters of a play whose translation was tinged with tragic meaning (at least from their perspective). Was this fundamentally Roman meaning of a Greek title reflected in the comedy itself? One of the fragments of Syracusii suggests that it may have been (Caecilius Statius 218–19 R³):

The speaker here must have been referring to someone whose pursuit of comic pleasure was leading them to neglect their duties. But to an audience member who knew about, had witnessed or perhaps had even experienced the siege at Syracuse, this line could have had another, very real resonance. We hear from Livy about the terrible hunger suffered by inhabitants of Syracuse upon its fall, and Diodorus claims that some Syracusans were even forced to sell themselves into slavery, just so as to be able to eat.Footnote ⁹⁷

Syracusii thus pithily encapsulates imperialism, both cultural and military, referring simultaneously to a Greek play made Roman and to a Greek city and Greek people made Roman. It also gestures towards a Roman city made Greek. The victory over Syracuse was especially memorable for the plunder brought back to Rome by Marcellus and paraded around during his ouatio. Plutarch tells us that the spoils of this victory decorated the Roman cityscape, completely transforming it.Footnote ⁹⁸ The city's inhabitants were thereby introduced to the pleasures of art, and were themselves changed, too: Livy traces the beginning of Rome's decline into dissolution to the importation of Marcellus’ victory spoils.Footnote ⁹⁹ How much more significant, then, is Syracusii via its designation of a comedy performed in a civic space adorned by the splendours stolen from the very people its title refers to? Further still, as the translation of a Greek text, Caecilius’ fabula palliata is a product of Rome's large-scale cultural acquisition, and the theatrical spectatorship it implies is yet another feature of the moral corruption which was this acquisition's corollary. After all, the Romans had learned about the pleasure of theatre from the Greeks (or so the story went), and there is even a potential connection to the city of Syracuse specifically. The Sicilian city was an important artistic centre with one of the biggest theatres in the Greek world, and its Hellenic luxuries were apparently hard to resist, even for Roman war heroes. An official investigation of the Senate was conducted in response to reports that Scipio Africanus was being excessively self-indulgent in Syracuse while in his winter quarters there.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ These allegations came from Cato, who, as quaestor in 204 b.c., accompanied Scipio to Sicily where he observed the general Greek-ing out in Syracuse through ‘a childish addiction to palaestras and theatres, as if he were not commander of an army, but master of a festival’.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Another Caecilian title which is the same as its original but also dramatically different is Hymnis (‘The Singer’). Whereas the title of the Greek play, Menander's Hymnis, conveys only its titular character's profession (she must have been a hetaira), as the title to a Roman comedy Hymnis becomes a speaking name (or, a ‘singing name’!) if, as seems likely, Caecilius used the girl as a singer of the cantica he would have added to his Greek model in translation.Footnote ¹⁰² But we can go a bit further still. In Latin there is an overlap of titular girl and play created by the feminine gender of fabula, the word with which titles of Roman comedies like Cistellaria and Carbonaria implicitly agree. Hymnis thus self-referentially conveys the translation's new musicality, becoming by virtue of its existence in Latin as the title to a Roman comedy the Greek equivalent of Carmen-aria — ‘the song-play’: since all words that end in -ις in Greek are feminine, this suffix can be employed to feminise any word, whether person or thing. Such a coincidence of play and girl would have had significant metatheatrical potential for the Roman comedy, and one wonders if the following fragment from Hymnis could have been referring to both girl and play — if it did, in fact, refer to Hymnis herself (scholars have thought so but we cannot possibly be sure) (Caecilius Statius 71 R³):

Thus Caecilius’ Greek titles can be fundamentally Roman via double meanings that are created only by their recontextualisation through translation. We could keep going. Take Pausimachus (‘The Peacemaker’). As the title designating a Roman play about the newly subject Greeks which was, further, performed by slaves whose enslavement may very well have been the result of Roman imperialism, Pausimachus becomes, to at least some of the audience, deeply ironic.

This same duality is detectable in several of Caecilius Statius’ Latin titles, which recreate the effects we have been looking at in Greek titles. That is, titles in Latin can duplicate the bilingual play produced when Greek titles label comedies in Latin performed at Rome, reversing it by equivocating on the use of a Latin word to title a comedy set in Greece. This is strongly suggestive of authorial intent, i.e., that Caecilius Statius recognised the dynamic we have been studying above, since he seems to be replicating it in titles that must be of his own invention. Such is the case for Triumphus. The primary definition of this Latin noun is ‘triumph’, the procession to the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus granted to victorious Roman generals throughout the middle and late republican periods. But Caecilius’ title cannot refer to this rite since it must designate a play about Greeks set somewhere in Greece, where the triumph did not exist. If the genre of Roman comedy itself were not enough to assure of us that fact (not a single surviving play is set anywhere but Greece), it is confirmed by one of Triumphus’ two preserved fragments, which mentions an obviously Greek character called Hierocles (Caecilius Statius 228 R³):

Triumphus, then, must simply mean ‘victory’, and the comedy may have featured a character recently returned from war. However, as a play performed in Rome during the middle Republic, Triumphus cannot shake its reference to such an important institution, especially in view of debates over the triumph which were playing out in the public arena exactly during Caecilius Statius’ lifetime. Rome's wars of expansion brought triumphs with ever greater frequency to the city, as well as controversy about the right to hold one. The 190s and 180s saw prominent Roman generals like Fulvius Nobilior, Manlius Vulso and Scipio Asiaticus engaged in bitter battles with their political enemies over the distinction,Footnote ¹⁰³ an issue that even made its way onto the comic stage. In Plautus’ Bacchides, slave Chrysalus announces his exit from the play with a joke about the triumph which he eschews for its commonness (Bacch. 1072–3):

We might then ask if Caecilius Statius chose Triumphus (rather than, say, Victoria) in acknowledgement of this very topical debate as well as to equivocate playfully on the cultural identity of the designated comedy. Such teasing is indeed suggested by Triumphus’ other surviving fragment, which features a glaring Roman allusion in subcenturiare (Caecilius Statius 229 R³):

By naming his comedy Triumphus, our playwright at once acknowledges and, I suggest, deliberately recreates in Latin the effect of using Greek titles for Roman comedies, a polysemy generated by the genre's fundamentally dual cultural allegiance. This interplay of equivalence and difference reveals the translator's concern with questions of authorship and originality that are central to Roman comedy. How have the Latin playwrights modified their Greek originals? The Caecilian titles implicitly give us an answer to that question, namely that irrespective of the playwright's fidelity to or divergence from his model material, the plays of Greek comedy are transformed simply by virtue of their transposition to Rome. The last set of titles we will consider illustrate this nicely.

Four plays variously titled ‘The Changeling’ are attributed to Caecilius Statius: Hypobolimaeus uel Subditiuus (‘The Changeling’), Hypobolimaeus Chaerestratus (‘The Changeling Chaerestratus’), Hypobolimaeus Rastraria (‘The Changeling/Play about the Hoe’) and Hypobolimaeus Aeschinus (‘The Changeling Aeschinus’).Footnote ¹⁰⁴ These titles unambiguously point to the suppositious child plot featuring a child ‘placed under’ a woman as if she had just given birth to it, a trope that was very popular in ancient comedy: De Poli counts eleven Greek comedies that feature hypobole in their titles written within 200 years of each other by eight different authors.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ But Caecilius Statius is (as far as we know) the only playwright to have composed more than one comedy so titled, as well as the only Roman playwright to title a comedy after the motif. In fact, despite the claim at the end of Plautus’ Captiui that pueri suppositio is a hackneyed trope avoided by the foregoing play,Footnote ¹⁰⁶ only one suppositious child appears in all of surviving Roman comedy, the baby used by Phronesium in Plautus’ Truculentus to fool her soldier boyfriend. But the changeling's ‘titularity’ in Caecilius’ plays as well as the ancient testimonia suggest a different focus from what we get in Truculentus. Caecilius’ hypobolimaeus plays were not about the mother's deception but were set later, revolving around the changeling child himself and his vicissitudes as an adult. Further, these seem likely to have culminated in the changeling's recognition as someone else's son. Caecilius Statius’ hypobolimaeus comedies also featured doubles — two sons and two fathers, pairs that were further contrasted via association with country or city.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ These are all fertile comic motifs, but the changeling is also a fertile metaliterary motif: a suppositious child appropriated by a mother who did not create him is a most fitting image for the kind of appropriation involved in literary translation. A translator makes someone else's play his own, an act which creates a series of doubles mirrored by the doubles in the changeling comedies: two fathers, two sons; two authors, two plays. This is also expressed by the very multiplicity of Caecilius’ hypobolimaeus comedies, which are doubles of plays about doubles. If the Greek original (or originals) featured doubles, too, the pairs of doubles in the Latin versions of these plays are doubles of those doubles. And there is more. Two of Caecilius Statius’ hypobolimaeus comedies and one additional play may bear titles that are themselves double, a literal duplicity which would metapoetically gesture towards translation and the dynamic it entails. Let us have a look.

In all genres and periods of Greek drama we find double or alternative titles separated by ἤ. These likely originated in the plays’ bibliographical Nachleben, products of the titular variation discussed above.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The double title likewise occurs in every theatrical genre of Roman drama.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Horsfall considers them to be ‘of great antiquity’ but nevertheless identical in origin to their Greek cousins.Footnote ¹¹⁰ However, there is another, more likely explanation — at least for two of Caecilius Statius’ three double titles. Hypobolimaeus uel Subditiuus and Obolostates uel Fenerator, both comprised of a Greek title followed by its translation into Latin, are, I suggest, the products of (and thereby reveal) an ancient tendency to treat the titles of Roman comedies as equally renderable in both languages. Consider Plautus’ didascalic references, which set forth the Greek and Latin titles side by side like alternative titles for the same play (e.g. Sortientes and Kleroumenoi). Even comedies whose prologues do not contain the title's translation are occasionally referred to in the opposite language: Festus refers to Mostellaria as Phasma,Footnote ¹¹¹ and Cicero calls Terence's Heauton Timoroumenos Ipse se Poeniens.Footnote ¹¹² The same phenomenon must be behind the title for Poenulus (in use already by Varro's timeFootnote ¹¹³): this comedy is actually called Carchedonius, as per the prologue (Plaut., Poen. 53–5; see the Supplementary Appendix), a title which has been translated into Latin and turned into a diminutive.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Admittedly, for Caecilius’ titles we tread on shakier textual grounds. Neither Hypobolimaeus uel Subditiuus nor Obolostates uel Fenerator is actually attested as such in our literary sources; both double titles are the invention of modern editors who considered it unlikely that the playwright would have composed two comedies with the same title, one in Greek and the other in Latin.Footnote ¹¹⁵

More puzzling still is Caecilius’ third double title. Hypobolimaeus Rastraria is actually attested as such, even if its transmission is somewhat vexed.Footnote ¹¹⁶ This title is Caecilius’ only title with the characteristically Roman -aria ending that disappears from palliata titles after him, and, si uera lectio, would pair two different titles to make an unparseable whole whose parts work only as appositives. Does Hypobolimaeus Rastraria result from the same tendency to treat the source text's title as a de facto equivalent for a play's Latin title? If so, is Hypobolimaeus Caecilius’ source text and Rastraria the title of his translation? Here the changeling child in Greek would be juxtaposed with a thingly title in Latin, creating a face-off of actors which might be inviting us to ask whose agency is dominant in the play so titled. While the hypobolimaeus’ role in the plot is clear enough, we can only guess at the drag-hoe's function. Was this tool somehow involved in the play's recognition scene, or does it refer to the countryside association of one of the sets of doubles?

Once again, absolute certainty as to these titles’ author-ity eludes us. But at the very least, we can confidently say that Caecilius Statius gave his translations titles which he knew would be set side by side with and/or interchanged with their Greek and/or Latin equivalents. And this relation is itself productive of meaning. Take Hypobolimaeus uel Subditiuus. As we have seen above, Hypobolimaeus means something markedly different as the title for a Latin play, taking on a metaliterary significance that is absent from the Greek comedies so titled. As much is in fact reflected in this title's Latin translation, Subditiuus, which is not an exact equivalent for Hypobolimaeus. For Subditiuus means not just ‘suppositious’, but also ‘counterfeit’ or ‘copy’; Quintilian uses this same metaphor to describe how the ueteres grammatici would remove wrongly attributed books from the canon.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Subditiuus is, further, a very comic word, used as such (e.g.) in Plautus’ Amphitruo of the fake versions of both Amphitruo and his slave Sosia.Footnote ¹¹⁸ If in fact attributable to the playwright, the second part of Hypobolimaeus uel Subditiuus is much like Triumphus in that it verbally enacts the polysemy of Greek titles once these are recontextualised through the process of translation. When it functions as the title of a comedy turned into Latin for performance at Rome, Hypobolimaeus takes on a new, additional meaning present in Subditiuus, which hints that the Roman comedy is a ‘fake’ version of the model upon which it is based. The self-deprecation involved in implying the inferiority of the Latin version of a Greek play would be a typically comic move, similar to what Plautus is doing when he claims to have translated Greek plays into barbarian.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Caecilius Statius, that is, seems to have been alive to the way that translation problematised his authorship, and we can observe this dramatist simultaneously acknowledging his literary reliance and pointing out the transformation it entails in his titles.